Elad Lassry, Untitled, 2018

The Institute of Contemporary Arts is delighted to present a new print edition by Elad Lassry.

Made exclusively for the ICA, this is the second edition the artist has produced during their career.

About his practice, Lassry states:

‘My work deals primarily with the conundrums, capacities and failures of representation. I look at the remarkable details that photographic registration allows, and its inevitable existence within a network of multiple agencies and structures. I bounce back and forth between the depiction of a specific subject, human or animal, to the depiction or rendering of a vacant shape; revisiting histories, rupture in cultural systems and constructions of meaning.’

In the centre of the image, Lassry placed a production still of late actor Anthony Perkins and his onscreen love interest Blyth Danner from the 1974 film Lovin' Molly, which was obtained from an original negative.

About the edition, Lassry states:

‘Anthony Perkins was promised the place of the cinematic leading man. Perkins’ headshots, roles and press, all joining forces to secure that promise, was failing by what appeared unexplained. Something was failing his picture. He serves as a “stand-in” for a “man” in the work, regularly featured nameless, with no indication of year or source, he's reduced to simply a photograph of a man.

Considering Perkins’ tragic life, one of intricate lies and conceit, ending painfully in being outed by the media via an announcement of his HIV infection and AIDS taking a toll on him, a popular claim that his secret life prevented him to truly shine on screen alongside his female love interest.

In a similar nature to the presentation of the male and female subjects in the photo, (bluntly missing credit due), the arrangement of shapes at the corner of the page, fall perhaps short in making a case for taking space. Spatially competing with the photograph, in the sense that they occupy as much as double the space, and suggest a considerate order, the shapes oscillate between the decorative, and historic. Referencing at once a textbook atomic-like rendering and a Thanksgiving preschool urgent decoration initiative, this speaks on the duality of the picture. On one hand, it is a document with details revealing like no other technology, on the other, a deceptive, impossible registration that depends on multiple agencies and structure to arrive at a "valid" meaning."

Born in Tel Aviv in 1977, Elad Lassry moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and studied art at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California. His work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthalle Zürich and the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan among others and included in numerous international group exhibitions. 

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Collection from the ICA is FOC.

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